


Sunshower

by moolktea



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, nero propaganda, some details are tweaked
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-15 19:25:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19302238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moolktea/pseuds/moolktea
Summary: Vergil spends entirely too much of his life not knowing what to say and never meaning what he says.-Or, 5 times Vergil got hugged and the 1 time he gave a hug.





	Sunshower

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NewLakituPls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NewLakituPls/gifts).



> HGHSH i wrote this bc i was horny for vergil pain too and bc he was the only sparda boy whose pov i've never tried before + his time to b pushed off of the cliff had come  
> sort of a twin fic to Petrichor but it works alone too
> 
> the 5 + 1 idea came from the person this fic is gifted 2, i just ran around w/ it

**1**

Two weeks before Vergil turns eight years old, he’s given a responsibility that he isn’t ready for, and a birthday present that he isn’t old enough for.

His father is kneeling in front of him, one of his large hands pressed against the top of Vergil’s head, his fingers ruffling the loose strands of hair. Vergil usually styles his hair, slicks it back in that clean, neat style that differentiates so clearly him from his twin brother, but the man had caught him at a particularly lax moment. He’d quietly dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night, shaking his head in silent refusal when Vergil had turned to Dante, rubbing the sleep out of his vision and going to wake his brother.

His other hand is currently pressing Yamato into his hands, which is so heavy that Vergil feels himself tremble underneath the weight of it and everything that it implies, the tips of his fingers scraping soundlessly against the pattern of the blade’s sheath.

“Why?” Vergil asks before he can stop himself. It’s unbecoming of him to speak out of turn, actually--he’s always been an avid listener of his father’s rules, hanging off of each one of his words like they were more precious than gold.

Sparda is invincible, the strongest person that Vergil knows, and he admires his power, hopes to someday be just like him, wielding the strongest weapons known to man. But he hadn’t imagined that day would come so soon, and he’s caught off guard, unprepared in more ways than one to accept this from his father.

“What about Dante?” he presses on, because as much as he fights with his brother over everything, Dante is still his twin, and they’ve always been equal in every way.

It simply isn’t fair if Vergil gets the Yamato and Dante gets nothing, and he’s almost prepared to refuse his father’s gift.  They’ve always competed against each other, testing their physical and mental limits to see who’s stronger and who’s faster and who’s better, and if he gains the upper hand over Dante in such a manner, he can hardly take pride in his victories over his brother.

Sparda looks a little distant at the mention of his brother, his blue eyes turning sad in a way that Vergil doesn’t quite understand as he shakes his head, strange sort of smile curving at his lips. His father has always been a particularly serious man, reserving his gentle smiles for the quietest or proudest or most important moments, and Vergil can’t figure out what kind of occasion this particular instance falls under.

“I’ll give your brother his in the morning. But for you--you understand why I’m giving this to you, right? It’s more than a sword for you.”

Vergil thinks he does know, or at least he’s beginning to know, and he really wishes he didn’t. He takes the sword properly into his hands, trying not to stagger backward from the weight of it as he brings it close to his chest. It seems so much bigger in his arms than it ever did in Sparda’s, the length of it casting a shadow on the floorboards in the dim light filtering in through the window.

“You’re leaving,” Vergil narrows his eyes up at his father, his words more of a guess than a true accusation or confirmation of fact, and Sparda’s eyes soften even further as he slowly removes his hand from Vergil’s head, dropping it down onto his shoulder.

“Not for long. I will return, once I’ve taken care of some business. I can’t afford to drag the two of you and your mother into things, though. So this is yours, while I’m away.”

His father leaves his true words unspoken, in the familiar way that he always does, perhaps because he is hesitant to so firmly spell out what this means for Vergil, to drop this weight upon him in such an inescapable fashion. He’s never been very much of a talker, something Vergil has inherited from him, so he instead reaches out with his free hand, touching Vergil’s hands where they’re still wrapped around the Yamato.

Vergil doesn’t want it.

He doesn’t deserve his father’s trust in this matter, and he certainly doesn’t want to be deserving of it. His father isn’t giving this to him because he’s proven that he’s better or stronger than Dante or because he’s shown himself to be worthy of it--he’s giving it to him because, by a stroke of luck, Vergil was born mere minutes earlier than Dante, effectively making him the older twin, and the eldest male in the household in Sparda’s absence.

“I can’t,” Vergil says, already starting to shake his head, his voice more unsteady that he tries to make it, even as his expression remains perfectly neutral, in the way he’s taught himself to do long ago.

He has only a vague idea what kinds of threats are lurking outside of the safety of their home, what exactly his father is trusting Vergil to protect their family from, but he already feels like he won’t be able to do it. Vergil is not often insecure in himself and his own ability, but compared to his father, who easily fights both of them off with a single hand during sparring with less than half of his attention on them, who they’ve heard too many stories about to count, he feels like nothing.

More than that, he simply doesn’t want his father to leave.

He is not quite eight years old, and no matter how hard he and Dante try to pretend that they’re grown up, the facts are unchangeable--they’re not, and Vergil isn’t ready to have such a big part of his life suddenly gone, even if his father promises to return.

Maybe if he rejects his father’s unspoken request, if he pushes back this gift, the man will be compelled to stay.

“You can’t leave,” he elaborates, somehow wishing in this moment that he were Dante, Dante with his quick-witted tongue and his way with words and his innocent, bright smile that made everyone love him and made everyone want to stay.

“What about us?”

_What about me?_

There is a long pause, silence filling the still air between them, and Vergil wonders if his father is wracking his brain for something appropriate to say, but he eventually moves his hand downward and tugs Yamato out of his grasp. Vergil barely has time to feel relief before his father sets the sword on the ground, still next to Vergil’s feet, and leans forward, wrapping his arms around him.

From how his father is kneeling, Vergil finds his face being pressed into Sparda’s broad shoulder, the man’s hands gentle but firm at his back. In all the years between them, Sparda’s never been very much of a hugger--their mother did more of the physical comfort and coddling, and while their father obviously loved them, he’d reserve his displays of affection to pats on the head or to the back.

His father’s inexperience with hugging is obvious from the way he does it, his body stiff and tense against Vergil’s even as Vergil does his best to relax into the hug, surprised but still determined to relish in the sensation of it.

It’s not a long hug, because he and his father and very much alike, straying away from intimacy altogether and keeping themselves guarded and closed off, opening up to only a select few people in their lives, and still never completely.

When they pull away from each other, the mutual relief obvious in the mere action of separating, Vergil sees in his father’s eyes a particular level of confidence in him that Vergil is unable to find in himself.

“They’ll be fine. They have you, after all.”

Vergil takes those words and burns them permanently into his mind, bending down to pick Yamato back up and swallowing harshly, his resolve hardening underneath the emotion in his father’s gaze. Sparda offers him a curt nod, a silent acknowledgement of their unspoken contract, which Vergil can only return, feeling his heartbeat against his chest.

His father starts to stand up and Vergil feels like they haven’t had enough time, like there’s so much more he wants to say.

“Wait, father--” he starts, and Sparda turns his gaze down at him, his blue eyes expectant and waiting.

They’ll be fine. They’ll be fine, and his father will return, and everything will be okay, because his family has Vergil and Vergil has Yamato, and that should be enough.

So he bites his tongue, shaking his head minutely and averting his eyes to the side.

“If you have reservations, you may share them,” his father offers in that awkward, distant way of his, and even though Vergil has too much he still wants to say, he keeps his mouth shut.

Days later, when he and Dante and their mother are staring at Sparda’s turned back, watching him walk down the path that leads away from their isolated house and into the distance, Vergil wraps his arms around himself and tries to remember it, the phantom feeling of his father’s last hug.

It’s already gone.

 

* * *

 

**2**

Their mother likes Dante better.

Not truly, of course. The rational, logical part of Vergil tells him that their mother is a kind and patient woman, one with a large enough heart to love both of her twin sons just the same.

But feelings, in general, are both highly irrational and persistently annoying, and Vergil can’t help but take this statement as fact whenever he sees the way their mother looks down at Dante, smoothing back his bangs and laughing at something he’s told her, the smiles on their faces matching so perfectly.

Dante has their mother’s smile. They’ve always been told this, whenever they stray outside of their family's home and venture out into town together, Vergil always hears the same thing.

_What lovely sons you have, they look so much like their father—oh, but that one has your smile, doesn’t he?_

He and Dante are identical twins, physically the same, down to every last patch of skin, and yet, Dante has something that he does not. Maybe he’d have their mother’s smile too, if he could learn to do it more often.

It doesn’t matter, anyway--their mother doesn’t smile as much these days, perhaps finding the house emptier and colder in the time after Sparda’s absence.

Dante’s noticed it too. His brother isn’t quite as dense as he sometimes likes to pretend to be, and has taken to dragging Vergil out on endless, thankless expeditions out in town or around the woods in search of a perfect gift for their mother.

Vergil can tell that Dante’s motivations are a little less selfless than he depicts them as. Dante must hope, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that if he does or says or finds the right thing, then everything will be fixed and return to the way it was. Their mother’s smile will brighten again, and there will be a knock on the door, and they’ll open it to find their incredible, invincible father, looking no worse for the wear than when they’d last seen him.

Vergil himself might believe that too, if he didn’t know better.

His father’s sword is still tucked underneath his bed, the blade laying in its sheath, and Vergil hasn’t dared to touch it since the evening it was given to him. Sparda had promised him that he would return, but he had never established exactly when, and idea that he needed Vergil to take care of things while he was gone set an uneasy precedent.

Their father isn’t coming back until he decides to, or until he finishes whatever his mission might be. Or he might not even have the capacity to do either at all, because he might be--

He shakes his head, busying himself with staring at Dante, who has gotten into his head some other convoluted idea of how to fix things.

He can see the faint tinges of desperation in Dante’s movements, the emotion that drives him to climb up the trunk of the tallest tree that they can find, his fingers eagerly reaching towards a single, red flower growing on one of the frailer branches. It’s a foolish maneuver, with really only one plausible outcome, and Dante easily shrugs off his cautious warnings, disappearing higher and higher into the branches until Vergil can hardly see him.

Vergil keeps his fingers clenched tightly around his book, and hears, rather than sees, the cracking of the wood underneath Dante’s weight as the branch supporting him gives out. Dante’s yelp of alarm pierces through the air, prodding sharply at Vergil’s heart and tugging at his gut in worry, even if he knows that Dante will be alright in the end, their bizarrely-accelerated healing always available to pick up the pieces of their mistakes.

A flash of red catches his eye, and when he glances upwards, he sees the same flower that Dante was so fervently seeking, nestled perfectly in the lower arms of the tree. A half-second later, the muffled thump of Dante’s body hitting the ground draws Vergil’s gaze back down to the ground, and he takes quick, hurried steps towards his brother, kneeling over his unconscious form and lightly prodding at his skin.

The bruises marring Dante’s flesh are already starting to heal, vanishing underneath the natural tone of Dante’s skin, and Vergil exhales quietly in relief, knowing that his hard-headed brother will be okay. All he has to do is wait, and Dante will eventually wake up--that’s how it’s always been.

As he stands back up, he can’t help but glimpse back up into the tree again, staring hard at that red flower.

Vergil doesn’t believe in what Dante does, doesn’t believe that a single, pitiful flower has the ability to put back together what has fallen apart. The whole thing is a pointless endeavor, and the best option for all of them is to forget about it and return home.

Dante shifts at his feet and Vergil tightens his arms around himself.

He doesn’t believe it, but he can at least hope.

Dante, at the very least, seems grateful when Vergil hands the flower to him, beaming at him with their mother’s smile, the one that Vergil will never have. He seizes him by the hand, Dante’s touch scraping against the still fresh scratch marks on his palm that the trunk of the tree had given him, and drags Vergil back to their house, practically bursting with enthusiasm to turn it in to their mother.

Somehow, Dante manages to be right--their mother does smile when Dante pushes it into her hands. Either she’s become increasingly skilled at disguising her feelings, or his brother just knows her better than he does. Vergil wouldn’t be too surprised at either outcome, in all honesty.

Dante practically vibrates with energy as he zips out the door, likely in pursuit of more objects, and their mother watches him go for a long moment, a fond smile on her face.

“Thank you as well, Vergil,” she addresses him, and he almost jumps, trying not to betray the surprise that he feels as he turns to face her, unsure of what to do now that her attention is so directly on him.

He isn’t like Dante. He can’t laugh so freely with her or tell her some exaggerated story to draw happiness from her.

He can’t do anything.

“I didn’t do anything,” he mumbles out, casting his gaze pointedly on the ground.

“You looked after Dante. I’m glad that you two have each other to look after one another. So you won’t be alone, no matter what.”

Vergil tenses at her words, a vaguely familiar prickle crawling up his spine at the wistful tone coloring her voice. He doesn’t like the way it sounds, the way it makes him feel like he’s already lost something, and he inches steadily forward, trying to get a better look at her face.

“But we won’t be alone anyway. We have you.”

And Father. They have him--or _had_ him, at least.

She looks down at him for a long moment, the corners of her mouth curving softly upwards as she leans forward and strokes his face.

“You do have me. You’ll always have me.”

Vergil looks at the flower still cupped in her hand, then back at her smile, so similar to Dante’s. They’d been perfect before--Dante was like their mother, and Vergil took after their father.

So now, with one part of that so completely missing, what’s left for Vergil?

He wants to say that he’ll never completely have her, because that role will always belong to Dante, Dante who seems to understand her and know her and be like her in ways that Vergil himself can never hope to achieve. He is the eldest son of the family, distanced from the rest of them with a responsibility that can now only be his to bear.

But his mother has suffered enough lately, has had her normally energetic spirit dampened, and Vergil can’t bring himself to add another weight onto her burden, to give her another, infinitely more trivial thing to worry about along with everything else.

“I know,” he answers instead.

His mother doesn’t look away from him though, and, if anything, looks even sadder as she leans forward, draping her arms around his neck and burying her face into the top of his head, her warm breath tickling against his hair. She smells faintly of flowers, different from the one he and Dante had labored to retrieve for her, and he inhales quietly, trying to shove away the sudden sting of tears at his eyes.

“You can tell me anything, Vergil. If something’s bothering you, I’m always willing to listen--and I always know when you want to say something. I’m your mother, after all.”

So she is.

She’s his mother, no matter what, and Vergil’s worries are obviously irrational and unfounded.

He wants to believe that everything will be alright, so he shuts his eyes slowly, sinking into her warmth, and decides to say nothing at all, his worst fears soothed over and pushed back down beneath the surface of his consciousness, out of his mind, but not gone forever.

He’ll wish that he’d said something back then, he’ll wish it over and over again for the rest of his life, in fact.

But he’ll never want for it quite as hard as he did when he’d stood in that graveyard not too long after that hug, his hand wrapped around Yamato’s bloody hilt and dead demons slowly decaying at his feet, his eyes trained on the clouds of smoke slowly rising from the ashes of what used to be his home.

 

* * *

 

**3**

In Hell, there is no concept of time.

There is no rise and set of the sun to mark the passage of the days and nothing remotely alive around him to indicate the cycle of life and death, so Vergil has no way of knowing how long he’s spent in Hell.

Mundus likes to remind him, of course, likes to tell him that he’s been with him for any number of minutes or days or years, but if Vergil’s memory serves correctly, the number that he’s provided seems to change each time, and doesn’t always increase, either. So Vergil can either trust in the only company he has in the demon world, or trust in his own mind, which he isn’t so certain of anymore.

He used to pride himself on the depths of his mind, on the meticulous attention to detail he’d always kept so close to his heart. The Vergil of another time had such a firm grasp on the inner workings of his own being, and had defined himself by the level of control he’d had over every aspect of his life. He clung to his pursuit for the ultimate form of strength, to his willing acceptance of the demonic blood running through his veins, because he could never quite escape the sting of knowing that he hadn’t been enough to protect what mattered most to him.

But that Vergil had gotten lost, somewhere along the way. The person he’s become now is so far removed from his original intentions that it’s almost laughable—in his single-minded attempts to reach his goals, he’d ended up betraying them.

He remembers Dante, the way his brother had looked when Vergil had disappeared from his world forever, the fractured shock and grief cracking the blue irises of his eyes. In that single moment, he’d understood that he’d managed to hurt his brother more with that one action than anything he or anyone else had done thus far.

 _I used to want to protect you,_ he’d thought as he fell, but by the time he’d hit the ground and felt the weight of Yamato against his palm, the cloud of selfish ambition and the desire to prove himself above all else had overtaken him again. He’d looked up, and he’d seen the trio of glowing lights, so, so red, and he’d thought of the flower they’d given his mother and he’d thought of Dante’s coat with the still torn sleeve, and he’d thought of his father, who’d promised he would return and never did.

If he could defeat the demon king, if he could do what his father had done, then he’d finally be able to prove himself to be better than him, and he would never again need to rely on anything other than his own power.

_They’ll be fine. They have you, after all._

Or maybe he was just arrogant and stupid, thinking too highly of himself to think of anything at all.

It’s easy enough to realize this now, in the situation he’s in. He’s had a lot of time to begin to think about where he is now, laying in Mundus’ stone palm or at his feet, his body unresponsive to his futile mental commands.

“Your father was a lot more lively than you are,” the demon king informs him, and Vergil has enough energy to at least force his gaze to focus on the other, barely able to see anything through the dimness of the underworld.

His body is half human, after all, no matter how hard he’s tried to deny it, and his biology has begun to betray him, his vision faltering without the presence of natural light. It won’t be long before he goes completely blind, maybe, and perhaps that’s for the best. Seeing nothing at all is preferable to seeing what his own body has become, a corrupted, bleached-white thing, his skin crumbling and translucent enough that the veins of his body are sharply visible.

Vergil wouldn’t consider himself to be particularly vain, but looking at himself twists his stomach in a thoroughly unpleasant way, and it’s just overall easier to spend his time with his eyes shut, reviewing his memories, trying to hold onto his father’s stern gaze and his mother’s smile. He doesn’t think about Dante, though--doing that is too hard, because thinking of all the ways he’s grown so far apart from his own twin brother, how he’s made himself into a stranger with his own hands is worse than everything else put together.

It feels better when he fights, when he drags himself up and forces his failing, crumbling body to throw itself against Mundus, even when the other flicks him away with what feels like a fraction of his power. Defeat is humiliating, his blatant impotence is unbecoming, but at least it makes his mind go blissfully numb, and if he’s lucky, he gets knocked into unconsciousness for at least a couple of days.

Or hours. Or months.

When he wakes up and opens his eyes, the world around him looks absolutely no different from before, and he can’t even tell if he himself looks worse, so really, he just doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know why he’s still alive, either.

He lost. He challenged his father’s greatest enemy to a fight he had known, somewhere in the back of his still-rational mind, that he wouldn’t win. He’d drawn Yamato from its sheath and tossed it away, keeping only the blade in his hands, as if he’d known all along that it’d never properly return.

In the end, after everything he’s done, he’s still weak, still useless, still that same eight-year-old boy who watched his house burn and ran away from it, and by his philosophy, in this world where the weak have no place, he should be dead.

He thinks he might have asked, once, somewhere in between fragmented pieces of his recollection, but if Mundus had answered, he doesn’t remember either way.

The other is bored, perhaps, with the rest of the apparently mindless demons that inhabit his company. Or he still holds his vendetta against their father, and Sparda’s blood runs through Vergil’s veins, so this is the closest the demon can come to having his revenge, by toying with Vergil over and over again until he breaks.

Vergil doesn’t intend to give him the satisfaction of doing so, though, but it occurs to him that he loses no matter what he does--beating down his continuous rebellion is a source of amusement to Mundus, as well.

He doesn’t know what else to do, though. For once, all the paths in his life are so completely closed off to him. He’s in a hole that he put himself into, a grave that he’s dug with his own hands. His demonic blood continues to heal whatever wounds he receives, and his stubborn pride refuses to ever fully accept defeat, and so the only option available to him is to fight.

He’s unsure of how long he walks through this cycle, but one day, sometime after his vision has completely darkened and he sees exclusively inside of his own mind, he wakes up after his latest defeat and discovers that his amulet is gone.

He knows this because he always keeps it close to him, tucked away into the folds of his clothing, and the first thing he does whenever he returns to awareness is reach for it and wrap his fingers around the fading gold plating. It’s always in the same place, no matter when or where he is, and this time, when he touches his chest, he can only feel the emptiness where its indent in his coat is supposed to be.

Vergil’s lucky that he can’t see, or that there are no mirrors in Hell, because he doesn’t want to know what he looks like in this moment, when the last piece of the person he used to be is gone. Yamato is long missing, his father’s last gift having been swallowed up by the darkness when Vergil wasn’t looking, and he never had anything to remember Dante by in the first place, because he’d never thought that he would need it, not when they used to share the same face.

Both of those things are gone, and his mother’s gift is gone, and Vergil thinks he might be a little gone, too.

“Looking for something?”

He hears the amusement in Mundus’ voice, the fondness for his own private joke, and Vergil clenches his teeth, unable to see but knowing what’s happened all the same. He imagines his mother’s amulet, the thin chain held in the too-large hands of her murderer, and a strange sort of determination hardens in the pit of his stomach, a familiar, raw anger sparking in the back of his mind.

Vergil pushes himself up, staggering as his legs tremble unsteadily beneath him, barely able to carry his weight as he starts forward blindly in the direction of the voice. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do or what he even _can_ do anymore, but he’s spent entirely too much of his life doing nothing at this point.

He makes it maybe ten, fifteen steps before his body predictably gives out, but when he falls forward, he doesn’t feel the familiar jarring in his bones as his failing body meets the ground. Instead, his crumbling skin meets what feels like the yielding flesh of another body, so icy cold to the touch that Vergil automatically knows that it can’t be human.

He’s essentially being held up by the other at this point, and he feels a pair of freezing arm drape almost lovingly around his neck, and an inhuman voice far too his close to his ear.

“Pitiful thing--you always try so hard.”

He hadn’t known that Mundus could assume a humanoid form, hadn’t ever wanted to know in the first place, but he supposes it makes sense. He’s seen the creature phase out between states of being--he just hadn’t imagined that Mundus, for all his contempt for humans, would ever take the shape of one.

A cold, arctic finger trails down the curve of his spine, beginning at the base of his neck, and Vergil shudders instinctively, automatically lifting his hands to push the other away, but his muscles lock themselves into place when he feels the familiar, metal touch of the chain of his mother’s amulet being pressed against the curve of his shoulder.

The arms around his neck gently bring the two ends of the chain of the necklace together, clasping it firmly around Vergil’s neck, and the instant the pendant touches his skin, he feels an unavoidable sense of relief, his guard involuntarily lowering, his heart instinctively calming and his body relaxing.

It’s a mistake, and he’s made enough of those for a lifetime.

“I’ve observed you for long enough. You will prove a useful tool to me--the eldest son of Sparda.”

Vergil feels his protests rise up in his throat, he serves no one, he is underneath no other control but his own, and the only master he has is that of the limits of his own power, but he feels something brush against his temple, so lightly he can barely feel it, and suddenly, his mind is no longer solely his own.

He’s dimly aware of his physical presence, how he’s still being held barely upright in a mocking imitation of a hug, but all of his focus is elsewhere as he’s suddenly being forced into a memory he didn’t intend to recall.

Vergil blinks and he thinks he’s looking at his mother, he thinks he’s feeling her arms around him, and her warmth, and then he looks up at her smile, and _Dante_ has their mother’s smile, Dante is looking at him with that smile he’s waited eleven years to see, his identical face so clear-eyed and bright with hope, and then his brother reaches out and--

 _That’s mine,_ Vergil wants to say, that memory is his, a private moment in his private mind, and no one should see it but him.

“Is there something you wish to say? I’ll grant you a few useless last words.”

There is something, there’s always something he wants to say and never does, because Vergil has become so good at repressing his emotions, at stashing away the truth of his feelings to himself that he never means what he does and never does what he says and never says what he means anymore.

He opens his unseeing eyes again, and he’s staring up at the red, red flower, watching his brother climb into the highest branches of the tree, getting farther away from him. And then, suddenly, he’s the one moving one, but he’s falling instead, and Dante is gazing down at him, his palm hopelessly outstretched, and Vergil realizes, with awful clarity, he will never see his brother quite like this ever again, the two of them always destined to grow apart.

A hand tangles in his hair, pressing his face into an unfeeling chest, and his words die in his throat, his protests dissipating into nothingness. He can feel his memories sliding out of place, being pushed into somewhere deeper in his mind, the images growing dimmer and foggier like they’re being sealed away.

Vergil’s eyes slide shut and he finally stops fighting, because he’s become someone that he no longer knows, and he has no reason to fight for someone he doesn’t care about.

His brother's face is the last thing he sees before he becomes nothing at all.

 

* * *

 

**4**

He doesn’t become aware of himself again until much later, and even then, it’s only in the smallest of bits and pieces.

He’s still a puppet, being pulled helplessly along by the hand of his master, and the only thing he’s retained of himself are what he thinks were his morals. Luckily for Mundus, the person that he used to be seemed relatively unopposed to killing humans and slaughtering innocents, so his master encounters little resistance to his orders.

He had a name, once, but his master doesn’t call him by it, and he doesn’t feel that it belongs to him, anyway, the identity of Vergil tied so intrinsically to a different life. The memories of that person are, for the most part, trapped away--evidently, his master was unable to remove them completely, so this was the next best alternative.

Sometimes, the memories escape.

Most prominently is the one of the man with the incredibly familiar face, of white hair falling into blue eyes, but the name can never quite come to him, even when he tries to dwell on it, which isn’t often. Touching those memories _hurts,_ touching any part of that person’s life hurts, makes the space in his head feel too crowded and too loud, silenced only when he reaches a hand upwards and feels the strange amulet at his neck.

He isn’t sure what it is, but it feels oddly comforting to him in a way that almost nothing else is--at least, until he spots its twin, a perfect, identical copy of his own, wrought in silver instead of gold.

It hangs from the neck of the familiar stranger looking different and older than the one in his memories, and when he raises his sword, ready to put an end to his life and put this man out of his mind, he catches a glimpse of it underneath his clothes and it burns, hurts like everything else, until he has no choice but to retreat in his confusion.

He faces punishment for it, of course, his master deeply enraged and disappointed in the failure of his creation, wanting to know so desperately the reason for his defeat when nothing should have been able to touch him. His master doesn’t like being seen as weak, as anything less than perfect, and he gets the feeling that the person he was would agree.

He can’t explain it, or maybe he simply doesn’t _want_ to explain it—whatever the reason, the story of the strange amulet remains firmly buried in the back of his thoughts, latching on so tightly to his being that even his master cannot see it when he intrudes into his mind.

Things are much less consistent for him, after that, and he begins to hate the white-haired stranger, resent him for breaking through the fabricated peace of his mind. He starts seeing things, the memories that don’t belong to him, too much of them all at once, until he burns with an unnatural sort of curiosity to know who Vergil is.

His mind supplies him the answer, or at least tries to—it shows him the face of a woman, one who so strikingly resembles the one of the demons his master had recently created, it shows him the figure of a small child, pressed up against a brick wall, bruises and scrapes dotting his arms, the rain plastering his bangs to his face as he clutches at a sheathed sword, the entirely too-tall shadow of a figure leaning above him.

That, and the same face, over and over again, the one he keeps getting sent out to kill, the one that sends spikes of sharp pain through his head and chest, that annoying, frustrating, nameless man.

He doesn’t understand it—how a single person that isn’t even Vergil can be so essential to knowing who Vergil is, how this person can be so conjoined with Vergil’s own being that _this_ is all that he can see.

His frustration powers his blows, puts a heavier weight behind his strikes, but either something has changed with the man or with him, because he’s never quite able to get the upper hand on him again. It feels familiar, somehow, clashing blades and coming to a stalemate, endless competition in an endless fight.

_Have we—have I—done this before?_

He wants to ask this stranger, but he’s not even sure if he still can speak, even if he was allowed to, the effort of doing so resting too heavily in his mouth to form words. Something tells him that Vergil was never very good with words either, especially not when they tended to matter.

Eventually, he manages to learn the stranger’s name, when the man drives his familiar-looking sword into his chest.

 _“Dante,”_ he gasps out instinctively, the taste of blood quickly filling his mouth. It’s coppery and thick, and he suddenly remembers that he’s human, half of him, at least. His other half is demonic, his _father_ was demonic, and his mother had given him everything she had, and he’d just spent endless years serving underneath her murderer.

At the sound of his name, his brother jerks, confusion flickering across his expression as he scans the now-unfamiliar face in front of him, corrupted beyond recognition. Dante shakes his head, apparently thinking it a trick of his mind, and pulls the sword from his body. He barely feels the pain from the action, automatically falling backward, and is caught by a familiar pair of arms before he can touch the ground.

He and his brother had always learned to properly respect an honorable opponent, after all, the lesson their father had ingrained into their minds before they had even learned to pick up a sword.

He feels a shift against the skin of his chest, cool metal against his even colder skin, and his amulet slips free from underneath his armor. He can see the way his brother’s eyes catch the motion, resting slowly on the pendant, before his expression twists with a special kind of horror.

“...Vergil?” Dante asks, in a voice so careful it threatens to fly apart at any second, disbelief and hope and grief cracking it at the edges.

Vergil thinks he smiles at the sound of his name in Dante’s mouth, because it feels like coming home, and he’s closer to his brother now than he has been in a long, long time.

Dante inhales sharply, a soft, shuddering noise as he grips at Vergil’s shoulders, lowering himself until his face is pressed into his neck and his arms are not quite around Vergil’s body. He can feel Dante’s heartbeat fluttering in a panicked rhythm against his chest, but he isn’t sure if he feels anything for himself.

His skin is cold, so Dante’s tears burn into him when he feels them slide against his neck, and he hears his brother’s voice, more subdued and defeated than he’s ever heard it.

“I killed you—oh, god, I killed you, Verge. Please say something, please don’t be—“

If Vergil wasn’t choking on his own blood, he would say something. Or maybe he wouldn’t.

Their father is missing, their mother is gone, and he knows with an increasing certainty that he’s going to follow her. He won’t end up in the same afterlife as her, but he will absolutely die here. He’s going to leave Dante alone for the third time, because he still hasn’t changed, is still running away at eight, nineteen, however many years it is now.

So what could he have left to say?

_They’ll be fine. They have you, after all._

He lifts his hand as best as he can, and it takes nearly the rest of his life to place it against the back of his brother’s head, tugging lightly at the strands.

He wants Dante to look at him, he wants to see that face that so closely mirrors his own, because he no longer remembers what he himself looks like, and he wants to know at least his own face again before he dies. Dante somehow understands his nonverbal cue, lifting his head upwards, but tightening his grip around Vergil’s body.

It becomes increasingly difficult to focus on Dante’s face with the way his head spins, but he fights against his body for it, fights to see him because Vergil only fights for the things he cares about.

Dante is looking down at him with such open emotion on his face, a rawness that he doesn’t deserve, and even if their faces were still the same, Vergil would still think they look different. Dante’s face is so much warmer, kinder, accessible in a way that Vergil is still too weak to do. He’s never been able to look at anyone like that before, and now he’ll never get the chance to.

“Please say something to me,” Dante begs, hoping for something, a last word or message, anything to remember him by.

_I used to want to protect you._

_It’s good to see you again._

_Do you remember what it was like when we were kids?_

_You have our mother’s smile._

“Forget about me, Dante,” Vergil tells him instead of anything and everything that matters, weakly grasping at his amulet, breaking the chain from his neck and shoving the pendant roughly into Dante’s trembling hands.

Dante doesn’t respond right away, pushing himself back into the half-hug, and Vergil slowly feels his senses disappear, fading out one by one. He’d learned, a long time ago, maybe from his mother or father or his books or maybe not all, that sound was thought to be the last sense to leave before a person died.

Perhaps it’s true, because he hears, rather than feels, the faint brush of his brother’s lips against his forehead, a sound so soft it might as well have been silent.

 

* * *

 

**5**

After his initial three-or-so day exhaustion-induced coma upon his and Dante’s return from Hell, Vergil finds that he can no longer sleep.

It makes a sick sort of sense--he hasn’t had a secure home or a safe bed since he was eight years old, and even in the shelter that his family being whole had provided, Vergil was always a light sleeper.

His current issue has much more to do with the act of actually falling asleep, rather than staying asleep.

Regaining portions of his lost humanity presented itself with several problems, one of which being the influx of weak, human emotion he was now having to deal with. On some level, it had been much easier to stuff his consciousness into Urizen, because Urizen’s needs and wants had been so entirely overtaken by the desire for power that there hadn’t been much room for anything else.

It’s a bit of a problem now, though, because his actions as V had unfortunately carried over, and in the time that they had been separated for, V had evolved into an entirely new persona, of sorts, taking on a name and personality for himself, and just because Vergil had reabsorbed him didn’t mitigate the fact of his existence.

The complications that this brought with his personal relationships aside, Vergil is now more or less stuck with a full set of very human feelings, including the most unpleasant ones of fear and guilt. It isn’t as bad during the day, when he’s fully preoccupied with Dante’s idiocy and his awkwardness with Nero to dwell much on these things, but during the nights, which are entirely too quiet, Vergil stays awake and thinks.

Guilt is definitely the more annoying one, because Vergil is long used to the fear, is used to shoving his nightmares violently down and suppressing them behind a wall of nothingness, and as irrational and subjective as the feeling might be, it’s also somewhat natural.

For his guilt, however, Vergil had been forced to expand his circle of people to whom he genuinely gave varying amounts of concern beyond its usual parameters, to include all those faceless, meaningless humans who he had massacred in his rise to the ultimate demonic power. He’d be lying if he said that he particularly valued their lives or their meanings as individuals, but he does vaguely regret the amount of senseless sacrifice that had been wrought upon the city by his own hand, something he never would have even considered prior to his time spent as V.

The majority of the plague upon his mind, however, stems mostly from his brother and from Nero.

With Nero, the situation is easy enough to pinpoint--he’d torn off the boy’s right arm, sent him into a month-long coma, endangered the lives of several people he cared about, lied to him for a large portion of the time he’d spent with him as V, and had generally disrupted the peace of his life.

Considering that Nero had tried his hardest to help him, both as V and now as Vergil, it’s only natural that the clear imbalance in their actions would induce within Vergil some measure of feeling, one that would hopefully be rectified with time.

Dante, however--well, his brother always makes things difficult for him.

It’s impossible not to notice the change in his brother, even with the still-foggy memories that Vergil is trying to sort through. Dante is so ridiculously, unfairly happy with him around--even the whole time that they’d been wandering about in Hell, Dante had kept up his cheerful, casual demeanor, giving him these constant looks and touches on the arm, as if to reassure himself that Vergil was still there.

When they’d returned from Hell, he’d eagerly dragged Vergil to the apartment where Nero was apparently staying at, insisting on giving the two of them a proper introduction.

Vergil had stood awkwardly off to the side, nodding stiffly at Nero as the boy had slapped the back of Dante’s head with one of his spectral wing-hands before roughly pulling him into a hug, one that Dante had enthusiastically returned while rubbing his cheek against the top of Nero’s head.

Vergil thinks about that moment often, of how sharply he’d been reminded of how long he had been absent in Dante’s life. His brother had clearly built a life for himself in the years that Vergil had been away, and Vergil is honestly not too sure how he can fit in it anymore, feeling more like an intruder than anything else.

Even worse had been the look that Nero had gotten on his face, the way he’d slowly slid his eyes from Dante’s smile to Vergil’s neutral face, tilting his head in a confused sort of way, a slow sort of realization crossing his face.

The next day, Nero had suggested that Dante and Vergil move back into the shop, and had tagged along, grumbling something about “needing to babysit” to his two female companions whose names Vergil had been told somewhere along the way but had promptly forgotten.

So now Vergil was effectively trapped in a single building with both sources of his newfound emotional turmoil, a move that he deeply suspects Nero had made on purpose, whether out of revenge or out of the desire to keep Dante happy, he isn’t quite certain.

Whatever the reason, it’s become a true problem in the recent days, because Vergil always sees Dante in his dreams, the betrayed and grief-stricken look on his face, the startling emptiness in his eyes, and when he walks through his days, seeing the happy, cheerful Dante of his current reality, he realizes exactly how badly he’d hurt his brother.

Dante could have spent his entire life like this, if Vergil hadn’t been so blinded by his ambition for power.

Vergil doesn’t like being reminded of this, doesn’t like to think over what is quite possibly the largest mistake he’d ever made in his life, so he’s settled on the very simple solution of not sleeping at all. He’s half demon, after all, so his biology can certainly handle the stress, and he’d never really slept during his long stay in the underworld, so he’s used to it

Or at least, he should be.

Perhaps he’s grown weaker, or merging with V has somehow caused him to become more human in more than the spiritual sense of the word. Either way, Vergil often finds himself unwillingly drifting off during the long nights, in the tired moments when he leans his head against the wall or settles in a little too comfortably into the couch.

He’s taken to correcting these little oversights by digging his nails into the palms of his hands, causing just enough pain to snap him back to wakefulness, a method which, while effective, has a habit of drawing blood, the substance dotting messily on the sleeves of his coat and sometimes onto his clothes. The crescent-shaped wounds on the flesh of his palms heal over quickly enough thanks to his heritage, but the blood has a tendency to stick to the fabric, and Vergil is rather averse to the filthiness of it.

Unfortunately, he was also averse to learning how to wash his own clothes as a child, which is damning him quite badly in the present as he stands over the kitchen sink, fruitlessly sticking the sleeve of his coat underneath the running hot water.

“...what are you doing?”

Ah.

Vergil reluctantly twists his head to look at Nero, trying not to feel like he’s been caught in something particularly incriminating, which is hard to do given the confused look that Nero is leveling in his direction, his arms crossed over his chest. He looks back down at his coat, which he’d pushed about half of completely into the sink, despite the stain being confined exclusively to his sleeve.

“None of your concern,” he replies smoothly, to which Nero makes a disgusted sort of noise, stalking closer to him.

He instinctively tries to hide the evidence, but Nero is somehow faster than he is, his reflexes likely dampened by his lack of sleep. The boy pushes him gently aside with one of his spectral arms, and snatches Vergil’s coat out of the water with his human ones.

It takes Nero all of three seconds to analyze the situation, and the look he gives Vergil this time is much gentler, mixed in with a careful sort of concern before the boy quickly stuffs it underneath his usual expression of irritation.

“You’re just like Dante,” he grumbles, which Vergil tries not to take offense to. “Neither of you know how to do _anything.”_

Nero is perhaps referring to the singular incident in which he’d left Dante and Vergil in the house alone, and they had made a rather disastrous attempt to cook canned soup. In his defense, Dante had convinced him that the can was an essential part of the meal, to add “iron” or something of the sort to the food.

In his defense, they didn’t have canned soup in Hell.

“Do not compare me to him--Dante is far worse.”

Nero doesn’t bother to dignify him with a response, instead of turning off the hot water and reaching behind him for a spoon, scraping off the layer of dried blood from the sleeve before sticking it back under the cold water.

Vergil feels increasingly out of place in the situation as Nero ducks underneath the cabinet and unearths a bottle of dish soap, and it faintly occurs to Vergil that he perhaps should have used some of that in his cleaning efforts. He does his best to subtly observe Nero without looking too interested in what the boy is doing, but Vergil always dislikes being ignorant of something, especially when others have proven to possess the knowledge that he lacks.

Fifteen minutes later, by some unfathomable power, Nero thrusts his soggy coat back at him, the navy blue of the fabric restored to its normal shade.

“...thank you,” Vergil says as he accepts his coat, having spent the entire time struggling to spit out that single acknowledgment.

“Whatever,” Nero looks away quickly, and Vergil becomes distinctly aware of the awkward silence hanging in between them.

They don’t usually interact when Dante isn’t in the room with them, mostly because Nero seems still a little put-off by his demeanor and Vergil has an immensely difficult time coming up with something appropriate to say without thinking about their past meetings.

Nero fidgets in place, running his hands through his hair, and Vergil notes that it’s grown longer since the last time he saw the boy, his bangs nearly falling into his eyes. In search of something to do, Nero moves around the kitchen, setting some water to boil and reaching up into a cabinet for a container of something Vergil doesn’t recognize.

He waits for Nero to question him about the presence of blood on his coat in the first place, or at least to demand what he was doing up at such a late hour, but the boy seems thoroughly preoccupied in whatever his task is.

Vergil admits that he’s relieved at the lack of questioning--he wouldn’t know what to say in response, anyway--and silently slinks away to sit on the couch with the still wet coat, prepared to spend the rest of his night in solemn Dante-avoidance. He feels his eyes growing heavy, the sound of boiling water oddly soothing to his senses, and before he’s fully aware of himself, he’s already losing control of himself, drifting off to a state of semi-unconsciousness, awakened only when Nero snaps his fingers in front of his face, holding a steaming cup of something before him.

He stares at it in bemusement, a faint, flowery scent rising from the hot liquid inside, and Nero lets out an exasperated sort of noise, pushing it into his hands and flopping into the spot next to him, folding his arms.

“It’s lavender tea,” the boy elaborates, which means absolutely nothing to Vergil, and Nero must realize that, because he continues, “It helps you sleep.”

Vergil doesn’t want to sleep. If he sleeps, he’ll see Dante, he’ll see blue eyes burning into him with all the accusation in the world while the Dante of his dreams asks him to say something, anything--

“Whatever’s bothering you, it’s supposed to help with that too.”

He doubts that a flowery liquid can fix his problems, but Nero is still sitting next to him, and the boy had gone through all the trouble to do this for him. If Vergil ever plans to remotely repair his relationship with the boy, then he should probably start with the small things.

“Does Dante know?” Nero asks vaguely as Vergil takes the cup in his hands, sipping lightly at the liquid. The tea is warm, and surprisingly tangy, not an entirely bad flavor overall.

Nero doesn’t get more specific, nor does he seem like he expects Vergil to, so he swirls the liquid in his cup, staring down at the ripples.

“Dante is ignorant of many things. And he will stay that way.”

Dante absolutely cannot know that his brother is like this, that Vergil isn’t as well-adjusted to life in the overworld as he might like to believe, and he especially cannot know that he--or a memory of him, at least--is the root of Vergil’s issues.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

The look on Nero’s face is surprisingly open, free of the judgment that Vergil had expected to see, and for some reason, he’s still sitting here on this couch with him, instead of returning to bed himself. Vergil can’t say that he dislikes the company, though, especially when the silence of the nights tend to have a special way of getting into his head, twisting his mind into unpleasant spirals of thought.

“Why are you helping me?” He decides to pry, stepping tentatively out onto thin ice.

Nero tilts his head in a confused gesture. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“I ripped off your arm.”

There’s another lasting silence as both of them instinctively look towards Nero’s right arm, which is still crossed over his chest.

“...I got better,” Nero states lamely, and at Vergil’s flat look of disbelief, his pale cheeks dust with a light pink, his gaze flicking to the side.

“Look, I’m only going to say this once. You’re clearly important to Dante--the stupid old man is way happier with you around. And you should see the way he looks at you. All of that is good. Dante being happy is good. But...that doesn’t mean a whole lot if you aren’t doing so good yourself, you know?”

Vergil doesn’t know.

“I am doing fine,” Vergil says carefully, draining the last of the tea and setting the cup on the table in front of him. “If you are expecting me to ‘talk about it,’ then you are--”

He hears the rustling of fabric as Nero suddenly twists towards him, and then there’s a warm, gentle weight against his chest as Nero wraps his arms around his waist, pressing his face into Vergil’s shoulder.

Nero’s hug reminds him of the way his mother held him, warm and a little too tight, just enough to remind Vergil of her presence. The boy is shorter than he is, and his motions are little more aggressive, colored by his embarrassment, but the emotion behind it is genuine all the same.

“You don’t have to talk,” Nero mumbles into him, tilting his head to glare up at him through one eye.

“Especially not if you’re only going to feed me bullshit. But not talking still doesn’t mean you don’t have something to say.”

He pulls away, slowly enough for Vergil to miss the warmth around him, still a little too startled by Nero so willingly initiating friendly contact with him to respond.

Nero doesn’t seem to mind, though, huffing out and drawing his feet up to his chest, curling up into his corner of the couch and shutting his eyes. Vergil thinks he might be going to sleep, might be leaving Vergil behind for another long, quiet stretch of time, but after a pause, Nero continues.

“You wanna hear something really fucking stupid Dante did a while back?”

Vergil tilts the corner of his mouth upward, allowing his gaze to linger over the boy for an oddly fond moment. He does, in fact, want to hear it.

Nero tells him his story, and Vergil finds himself slowly relaxing at the quiet sound of Nero’s voice, his words filling up the silence that Vergil had so disliked, eventually losing their meaning but never leaving completely.

He feels the washed-out soap on the damp sleeve of his coat and smells the lavender, and when he sinks into a finally quiet sleep, he sees his mother's smile on his brother's face.

 

* * *

 

**0**

“So Sleeping Beauty gets up at last!” Dante crows from where he stands over him, a leisurely grin on his face.

Vergil is laying flat on his back, feeling bruises bloom against his skin, his healing automatically moving to soothe the pain and return his skin to normal. When he blinks up at his brother, Dante moves his head out of the way, and Vergil groans when the sunlight stings at his eyes, lifting up a hand to shield himself.

“What nonsense are you blathering about now?” Vergil mutters, trying to recall the events that had landed him here, but his head is swimming with a dull sort of ache.

“You don’t remember?” Nero’s much less irritating voice asks, the worry evident in his tone, and off to his right, Dante chuckles out loud.

“He’ll be fine, kid. Verge has always been pretty hard-headed. You, though--I thought you were about to cry your pretty eyes out.”

_“Me?”_

He hears Nero’s squawk of outrage, then a dull thump and a muffled grunt from Dante, and a few blue, spectral feathers flutter in the air.

“You were the one doing all the crying, old man! Haven’t seen you this worked up since the pizza delivery guy came a minute late.”

Vergil forces himself to sit up, if only to put an immediate end to this ridiculousness, a vague memory of coldly kicking Nero out of the way of some sort of demonic attack resurfacing as he does. Both Nero and Dante startle at the motion, kneeling in front of him with matching looks of concern on their faces.

“The thing had some weird spore-effect. Put you right to sleep for a couple of hours. Good thing you got it, and not the kid, though. He’s so tiny he would have been out for days.”

Dante is talking quickly, his tone as light as he can manage to make it, but even Vergil can pick up on the relief and gratefulness in his voice.

 _“Who’s_ tiny? Get your ancient eyes checked, bastard.”

Nero’s cheeks are pink, presumably flushed with fury, but when he glances over at Vergil, the blush deepens, and the boy nervously runs a hand through his hair.

“By the way...you…” Nero abruptly cuts himself off with a choked sort of noise, his fingers moving to tug at his own collar.

“Your coat’s all dusty now. I’ll wash it for you when we get back.”

Nero doesn’t quite meet his eyes as he speaks, and Vergil takes the silent gratitude for what it is.

“Hey, kid, my coat’s pretty dirty too! What about me? Don’t tell me I’ve also gotta shove you out of the way to make you want to help me out?”

“Just you try it!”

“How long was I incapacitated for?” Vergil decides to ask, because he still dislikes losing time, especially to involuntary unconsciousness, and Dante and Nero cease their bickering for long enough to answer him.

“Not long,” Nero reassures him, knowing well what a loaded topic the notion of sleep is for Vergil. “Three hours, max.”

“And you two...have been waiting here all this time?”

Dante shrugs, tilting his head to the side as he cracks the muscles in his neck and yawns widely.

“Sort of. Don’t worry, Verge, we had lots of fun while you were asleep. And you looked pretty out of it yourself--what’d you dream about, anyway? You feel like sharing?”

Vergil feels the smile curving at his lips without his permission, and, seized by sudden instinct, he leans forward, placing each of his palms against Dante and Nero’s backs, pulling them closer. There’s a moment of surprise, where both of them freeze in place, clearly not expecting the hug, but soon enough, their arms drape around him as well. 

What a picture they must make, three demon hybrids, armed to the teeth, sitting on the grass while tangled in a hug.

_They’ll be fine. They have me, after all._

_I want to protect you._

His words float up, soothing and warm in his throat, tasting faintly of lavender.

“I suppose I could tell you about it.”

**Author's Note:**

> twitter (where the wild daneros roam)  
> https://twitter.com/moolktea


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